Doing everything you can to get your email through

We’ve been working with a couple of clients over the last month or so ensure that emails are getting through okay and not caught up in a “Spam” box somewhere.

It seems to be getting harder and harder to use plain old email as a business tool – but there are a few things that you can do to help ensure that your email isn’t marked as Spam.

Missing out on incoming emails can be fatal for a business relationship – the sender may think that you just don’t care about them and go elsewhere with their business or you could be seen as being slow and unresponsive when in actual fact you would have loved to have received the emails.

The price of a missed opportunity like this could be your next income stream…

Email is a great way to communicate – think it, type it then send it – it’s not as time costly as a business letter – and it’s not trendy as twitter (see below).

Many spam gateways rank various aspects of an email according the a scale of elements within the email – if an email score higher than say 5 points – then it must be spam.

It follows that if you avoid the email scoring highly – then there is a batter chance your email will not be marked a spam.

So here’s some common do’s and don'ts if you really want your emails to get through:

Make it look like an email between two “real people” – much spam is automated with the exact same content.

Always add a “Hi” (or Hello name – or some such) at the top of the email – some spam writers avoid this and just start with their offer.

Always add a “Good Bye” (or Cheers and thanks – or some such) at the bottom of the email – some spam writers don’t want you to know their name and so often don’t include it.

Sometimes – depending on how well you know the person – add some “friendly” content – not the plastic “Hope this email finds you well today” kind of thing – but something like “Hope your weekend was great – nice sunny weather here”. This content is obviously (even to a dumb computer) not a sales pitch.

Always add a Signature file with your contact details under your name at the bottom – this helps make the email look “real” to the spam software – and it helps the recipient contact you if they need to about the contents of the email.

Use a good Subject Line that contains what the email is all about

Spam software looks really hard at what is in the subject line – does it mirror the words used in the content…? Or does it contain some of the words which score highly as potential spam words (see below)…?

A good subject line also helps the recipient too…!

Don’t use the obvious spam words in your email

Spam software typically adds points to the spam score of an email if they see words that feature the various products offered via spam (now I have to be careful here so this email doesn’t get marked as spam…! You know the words NOT to use…)

Words that describe the price of an offer can also score highly – so watch out for a description of the price that is zero – and rhymes with “tree” (Get it…?)

Use a reputable email provider – with your own domain name as the “from” address

It is possible to use a Hotmail or Yahoo account to run a business – but that could be another element that gets added to the spam score of an email. Free email providers were used a lot for spamming from – even Google’s Gmail has been used by spammers to send spam from

Using your own domain name helps with the professionalism of the email – and because having your own domain name costs a small amount spam software wouldn’t penalise you at all for using that.

When sending a large email using Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) – which you should always do when sending an email to a large group if you can’t use mail merge – some ISP’s will only accept a set amount of emails before stopping the delivery. (A couple of solutions to this is to use the mail merge function in many products or to install your own mail server software or use the inbuilt newsletter system in the E-C Toolset)

The Newsletter function in the E-C Toolset allows you to personalise the email and also can be sent out to a large list to bypass any constraints that an ISP may have placed on your account.

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Think of a series of txt’s sent to a group of your closest friends – and also being able to receive multiple txt’s from them – a great way to keep in touch through the day…

For those “twits” out there – this become another channel to get their attention and build the relationship with them – if you aren’t into this then that’s fine – at some stage your potential audience will be…!

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